On The Ground With An Icelandic War Photographer

Óskar Hallgrímsson documents the brutal reality of war in Ukraine

“​​I’ve seen this happen slowly — the evolution of it becoming a day-to-day thing. This building fell down, that person died under that bus stop — it just becomes life,” says photographer Óskar Hallgrímsson as we sit down for a chat during his visit to Reykjavík.

Óskar — or Skari — is one of only three Icelanders currently living in Ukraine. While over six million people have fled the country since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, millions more have been internally displaced. Skari chose to stay.

To this day, Russia continues its brutal assault on Ukraine — killing civilians and committing war crimes. As a photojournalist, Óskar is on the ground documenting the ongoing reality.

I saw the movie War Photographer by James Nachtwey, which is probably the most famous war photographer movie ever. Since then, I dreamed of becoming a war photographer because I thought it was exciting and cool, whatever. That was my dream. I ended up becoming a photographer, started working for the Grapevine, [which was] then kind of like Vice Magazine before YouTube, before the sponsorships, before the sex scandals, before everything — when they were just like a skate magazine. We had that special kind of look. We had Sindri Eldon writing stories. We went to Roskilde Festival, where I lost Sindri for half of the festival. It was fun. I was 22 or 23.

I was always one foot in the art world and the other in the photography world. I gravitated more to documentary work than news because I don’t like breaking news, I like looking at something and pondering what’s going on. In 2015, I graduated from the Iceland University of the Arts with a degree in visual communication. Since then, for 10 years straight, I’ve been travelling the world — working as a documentary photographer, coming here, doing some work, doing art, getting jobs here and there. In 2019, I’d just done a book about sex tourism in Thailand, and I was offered to come to Kyiv for a photo book festival. I lived in Vietnam at that time. Kyiv was just a city on my list. I knew it was kind of warm, kind of nice, very cheap, hot girls. I know it’s very sexist to say it, but that’s the only thing that I knew. I went there, fell in love with the city because it was so green. Day two, this nerdy, goofy girl walks out to my desk, and now I’m married, and we live there.

Mariika & Óskar

Kindest people, worst war

We can go on for hours if you want me to do a soliloquy about Ukraine. Ukrainian people are the best, the kindest, the most kind-hearted, loving people I’ve ever met in my entire life, and I’ve travelled all over the place.

The thing that I loved about Ukraine before the war is how varied it is — Ukraine is so different. It’s such a giant country, it’s one and a half Germanies in size — to drive from one end to the other takes you 24 hours.

My friends in Ukraine are all journalists, working for​​ The New York Times, Washington Post and shit. So, when the war broke out, I knew it was coming. I was 60% sure it was coming up until Thanksgiving. Then I had a Thanksgiving party with all my journalist friends, and at that party, we had a bunch of analysts, people with clearances and stuff like that. It was way worse, and it was coming.

On February 24, 2022, I was just at home. My wife and I packed our go bags, prepared the documents, and had everything in order in case we needed to leave. Everyone in Ukraine was panicking. Everyone just packed whatever they had, ran to their cars and onto the roads. I was like, “Okay, do I want to be outside in my car with missiles in the air or troops around me?” I thought that all of the command centres are here, so this is going to be the most protected zone. I live next to the train station, and I saw thousands of people outside the train station. No, I’d much rather do my purpose as a journalist, cover the news.

The famous Antonovsky bridge with segments of it missing due to the Russians blowing it up while they retreated to the other side. Photo: Óskar Hallgrímsson

The war rolls on

Those first few months were a mixture of excitement and fear, but the thing is, the world was with us for the first two or three months. Then summer came, but the war kept on chugging along. People stopped answering my emails. I was working for Mbl.is then, doing breaking news because it was breaking news back then — and the liberation of Kharkiv happened during the weekend the fucking Queen died.

They did it in two or three days — faster than the Blitzkrieg the Germans did in the Second World War. I sent emails. I called, “Dude, this is going to change the direction of the war.” I tried calling the editor, I tried everyone. This was September. People were finishing up the summer holiday season. Finally, I was able to get through to the evening staff, and they were like, “Don’t you understand how understaffed we are?” I’m like, “Yes, I’m so sorry, but there’s the biggest news event in the world happening at the moment. Just look at any other front page.” In the Sunday paper, they ended up placing a full front-page picture of Prince Charles from 1968 or something, fly fishing in Iceland with a 1500-word piece written by the guy who didn’t want to write my piece, and a 150-word piece and an AP photo. I’ll never forget this headline, “Úkraínumenn sækja í sig veðrið” (“Ukrainians are gaining speed”).

“This was an entire city laid bare, with dead people everywhere — that’s what I was seeing.”

I lost contact with, I would say, 80% of my friends here. Just because I’m so busy — I think that’s the main thing — and for them to be constantly reaching out to me, when all I talk about is the war in Ukraine… What else am I going to talk about? I have a single issue. So no, I never feel connected. Ever. Not at all. I mean, my family a little bit — the ones who talk to me the most and are interested in what’s going on in the war — but they usually don’t care. I guess my friends don’t care at all. Not at all. Nobody’s involved in the war.

It’s difficult to imagine things at scale for people, and we’re also very emotionally driven as a nation. We’re very good at being outraged for a very short time, but we have room for three topics to be outraged about at once. So as soon as Palestine [happened], that was the last outbreak that moved at that time — Ukraine was just gone.

Why Óskar stays

I went to Bucha. Like anyone else, I’d never seen war. It was war war. Not like, “Look at these remnants of one building in Berlin” war. This was an entire city laid bare, with dead people everywhere — that’s what I was seeing. That scared the living shit out of me. I walked up to the mass grave, where 40 people were lying inside. All you could hear was the wind and the sound of somebody either shovelling glass or scraping it with a mop. I looked at the ground and there was a hand poking out, and I just thought, “Okay, I’m here. I’d better do this right.” I got the sense of responsibility that I need to be on the ground to tell the story because there are so many ways to manipulate this truth. I just have to — for these people that I see here. Children.

Every journalist asks every single person who’s working in the war in Ukraine — almost exclusively — about the “morale” and stuff like that. How has it changed? It goes in stages. People swing between pessimism and optimism. How’s it going to go? No one knows. Anyone who tells you how this war is going to end is lying. They don’t know. They have no fucking clue. They can’t see the future. Nobody can. I can tell you that people are tired — to the point of exhaustion — almost everywhere you go. We’re done. This war has dragged on for so long that we’re done.

Is Ukraine going to win this war? Yes, 100%. Every single person will tell you that. Terms might change, but we’re never gonna leave this war without dignity. It’s too late. We’ve already sacrificed too much.

Photo: Óskar Hallgrímsson

A guitar string about to snap

I’m openly willing to talk about my mental health, especially because I want to talk about my mental health in my own words. There are a lot of people who want to talk about it for me.

I took my first mental health break when I started to experience PTSD. There were a few things I couldn’t stop thinking about — things that wouldn’t go away. Some of them I wasn’t even directly part of. But I thought they were so horrible that they just sat with me. I thought about them for days and days and days, and couldn’t get them out of my mind. It wasn’t anything kinetic — just an experience that someone had, and it was wrong. I had a pretty bad mental health episode back then. I used to describe it to my wife when I came back from a difficult assignment: it was like I was a guitar string that was taut. Like, really — you wind up a guitar string until it’s almost about to break. That’s how I felt very often coming back from these places.

“I got the sense of responsibility that I need to be on the ground to tell the story.”

Everywhere in Ukraine, there are these open-air street markets. One day I was just walking around one in Kyiv, just having a nice day. It was pretty warm, but it was late summer, or maybe even September or October, so it was probably after the Kharkiv offensive. That period was crazy intense. I saw a lot of things I should not have seen, heard, or experienced.

We were just walking around. I looked to my side, and Mariika, my wife, was doing something, maybe looking at some clothes. And I looked to my other side, and there was a guy putting away his stuff. It was late in the day, and he was putting all his mannequins out, laying them down on a tarp, side by side. And I just… I just looked at the guy and thought, “Oh, he’s taking down his mannequins.” And I then looked at the tarp, and it looked like what you’ve seen happening in Bucha. Some connection was made in my brain, and I just had a complete meltdown. I just lost it. I didn’t do anything — I just started crying.

I might be distracted from it from time to time. I’m not constantly being, like, “Oh, the war.” I watch TV, I go and meet my friends, have birthday parties, go to parks and shit — all those things as well. But then there’s an air raid, and you go stay in the bathroom all night and hope we won’t get hit.

War is a tricky thing, man. It has so many sides. It’s so weird how many things can be normal in a war. For me, explosions are totally normal, I don’t mind them at all, but getting out of bed annoys me more than the attack itself, which is weird but that is the absolute God-given truth.

Follow Skari’s on-the-ground dispatches from Ukraine at Heimildin.is and on Instagram @skari